The Grizzly Pad was my destination when I drove into Cooke City one Fri- day afternoon last month. I'd reserved what a travel agent assured me was the last available room in town on a busy weekend when visitors would outnum- ber the locals three or four to one. During the ride through Yellowstone, I found plenty to keep me occupied: agoraphobia-inducing mountains, val- leys, and gorges; herds of elk and bison foraging in the pines or rooting in the snowy meadows or planting themselves stolidly in the roadway; pronghorn ante- lope; ravens; the occasional eagle. In the broad, glazed valley of the Lamar River, I spent several minutes studying a silvery critter a hundred yards away, perched atop a boulder beneath a black spruce, " ..... ....... 't< . . i! ' . ", ), ....; '..:'. : ..... i:"':' : . . . ) ... .- < " "'," , , . ":", w . l , N'" , ' .. '';'.j"' V ';-. -.... oJ' . ::: . "" n .' .. ,I !\ I ' '," ': ,e ... I , , , , the no-vacancy thirty-two-room Soda Butte Lodge, dozens of Yamaha, Ski- Doo, Polaris, and Arctic Cat high- performance machines were lined up uniformly; like suburban commuters on a train platform. While I was checking in at the Grizzly Pad, snowmobilers were arriving from beyond the "Road Closed" sign, pulling plastic sleds laden with luggage. I saw a multitasking father riding with two pacifier-sucking tod- dlers balanced in front of him, then a family of four clad in Martian-green snowsuits and hehnets, astride matching mom-and-pop and junior-sized ma- chines. These travellers and scores of others had made the last leg of their journey from a parking lot ten miles east of town, where Highway 212 inter- i.' " ...... -. .. ';< 1' ? ",' ...: . " , ' .."<'; . " '. .. . .. . ,'. ", '" /-' .( .,'.. .";" . . , :<1', around, and sideways for miles and miles. " Photograph by Sylvia Plachy. before concluding that it was a coyote rather than, as I'd hoped, a lone wolf that had strayed from one of the Canis lupus families that were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. There wasn't much traffic, but, three times while I was parked on the shoulder, pickup trucks with Idaho plates, towing snowmobile trail- ers, chugged past me. When I reached Cooke City; I knew immediately that by virtue of my being trailer less and snowmobileless I was consigned to a tiny, pitiable minority: Outside the town's biggest hostelry, sected a plowed road bound for Cody; Wyoming. Most had started out from what I heard one Cooke City citizen refer to as "back East"-Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, North Da- kota, South Dakota, and other places where flatness is the norm and unfenced snowmobiling terrain is an elusive com- modity-and they had arrived with the breathless reverence of pilgrims at a shrine. They were buoyed by an absolute confidence that, no matter how noisy or smelly or generally obnoxious their vehi- cles might strike narrow-minded folk elsewhere, there wasn't a mortal in Cooke City who would utter a dIscour- aging word. M ost avid snowmobilers believe that where the trail ends the real fun begins. One dubious but popular local activity is high-marking, an amusement that thrives in inverse proportion to good sense. High-markers seek steep slopes covered by fresh powder, and there they play chicken with the laws of gravity; fUll-throttling uphill until the moment when either they turn back down the slope or their sleds topple. While high- marking obviously involves a certain quotient of brawn and aclùeticism-de- manding more finesse than, say; com- petitive peeing for distance-it was most aptly characterized, for me anyway; as "a perfect example of what happens to peo- ple's brains when they get a big machine between their legs." A success:fi.ù day of high-marking is one in which the rider spends no time underneath his sled, the snowmobile itself emerges undamaged, and no one has triggered an avalanche. The adult male who people in Cooke City agree is the least likely to devote his leisure hours to high-marking-or, for that matter, to driving a snowmobile- is a fifty-one-year-old environmental activist and iconoclast named Jim Barrett, who had distinguished himself among the locals in the aftermath of a Fourth of July; 1998, mountain-bike ride that he took in an area adjacent to Cooke City known as the New World Mining Dis- trict. To get there, Barrett pedalled east on Highway 212 and then onto a gravel road that steadily climbed toward Daisy Pass. During the winter, this is the main path to the back country playground that draws the snowmobiling masses to Cooke City: The New World Mining District- where gold was extracted from the late eighteen-sixties until the turn of the cen- tury-comprises ten miles of groomed trails and approximately twenty-five square miles where snowmobilers, de- pending upon the topography and the trees, are free to roam. (Beyond its bound- aries lie national-forest and designated wilderness lands where motorized vehi- cles are prohibited-which is not to say that this prohibition is rigorously obeyed.) Even though the high-marking sea- son was, of course, long over by the Fourth of July; Barrett discovered ample THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2002 45